noaa

It doesn’t take a geoscientist to know that severe weather impacts our lives. Tornadoes, hurricanes, windstorms, solar storms, droughts … the list goes on.

Tornadoes are notoriously difficult to forecast, with often deadly results: In 2011, tornadoes in the U.S. killed more than 550 people, a higher death toll than in the past 10 years combined. Now a new study of short-term climate trends offers a new approach to tornado forecasting that may give people in tornado-prone regions as much as a month of forewarning that twisters may soon be descending.

The Obama administration emphasized scientific innovation and education in its fiscal year 2012 budget requests. On Monday, the president’s science advisor, John Holdren, summarized the requests across the different agencies as part of a “tough-love” strategy outlined in the president’s State of the Union speech in January to “win the future.”

On Dec. 18, 2009, a winter storm deposited two feet of snow in a swath from the North Carolina mountains to Baltimore, Md., shutting down airports for days. Eight days later, a Christmas blizzard ripped through the Midwest, stranding holiday travelers in Nebraska and the Dakotas under almost a foot of snow. But which storm was worse? It’s a difficult call to make, because unlike other natural disasters, snowstorms have no categorization system. But researchers at NOAA are changing that: They are creating a unique ranking system to show how winter storms impact society.